cooking

So the low/ no/ minimal fat, no carbs, no salt, no meat, no dairy, no wheat discussion is in high gear among some of my friends right now.

Because this is at least half a dozen blog posts, I'll kick off the discussion with

Low/ No Fat Diets:
Low Fat- if you Google low fat/ no fat eating, you get a lot of articles about how dangerous this diet can be. But then there's this Doctor from Yale and Case Western, named Caldwell B. Esselstyn (no, really) who advocates a basically no-fat diet for stopping and/ or reversing heart disease. His basic premise is that consumption of any/ all fat is the cause of atherosclerosis. Obviously, meat and dairy fat are considered bigger culprits but the author considers oils like coconut and olive to be equally bad.

The same doctor collaborated with a guy named Gene Stone to edit this book: Forks Over Knives which is not quite so radical, allowing for avocado and some single-pressed oils. There's also a documentary by the same name which is essentially a straightforward denunciation of meat, dairy & the American Food System.

Lastly, one of their partners, a T. Colin Campbell is the author of The China Study an epidemiological study which purports to prove that cancer and heart disease are curable/ completely avoidable if one eats an extremely low fat, vegan diet.  There are so many problems with both study design and data interpretation that I think it's reasonable to say the study has been discredited. These problems are well summarized by the one-star customer reviews of this book on Amazon.

I have no conclusion on low-fat, no-fat other than I'm not generally too impressed by people who are claiming cures for cancer. I tend to think that cancer is just what the human animal dies of given our comparatively long lives... but that's just my simple mind. Tomorrow: Low-carb/ no-carb.